Pick-and-place Lego prototyping

[Ned] tipped us off about his project for a class at Carnegie Mellon. Utilizing a Denso 6-AOF robotic arm they have built a rapid prototyping machine that uses Lego as the building material. LDraw, the open standard Lego CAD program, is used to build a model which is then translated into MATLAB files that the robotic arm can use for placement commands. Right now pieces need to be placed on a template for the robot to find and pick up.

It’s great that Lego pieces are used because they are readily available and inexpensive, but this type of precision robot makes the project unattainable for most tinkerers. Still, the concept is interesting and we could see an end goal being a more widely available machine. It’s not too much of a leap to image a RepRap type machine that takes internal measurements of a circuit board and the components, calculates inside case dimensions, then builds a prototype enclosure from common Lego pieces.

it’s probably so slow because of the precision required to place the pieces in between each other e.g. seconds: 24-26. lego bricks next to each other have a spacing of .2mm or something like that, so you need to be pretty darn accurate!

@partnerincrime
i second that as i was playing with the schools robot arm one time and had the bigger legos with larger spaceing(the little kid version…) i had a VERY hard time getting it to line up and not just crush them and trigger a crash on the program.

I agree it’s completely pointless. It’s just a fun and (I thought) interesting way to combine technologies to accomplish something. When it changes from pointless to slightly useful is when it does what we originally wanted it to do, which is decompose a solid model (Solidworks, ProE, Inventor, etc) and build a model out of that. Even more, something like this could find its way to a Children’s/Science Museum to teach kids the basics of CAD and more advanced development processes in a language they can understand — Legos.